To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

Wednesday, March 05, 2014

On C4SS and the "Cultural Left"

On C4SS's "outreach mission": Today @C4SSdotorg
came under fire for throwing away its anarchist outreach mission in
order to promote "bargain basement content" like social justice and
other trivial "PC" concerns. Our goal is to promote left-market
anarchism to a broad, mainstream audience.
If our mission is "outreach," as he says, it obviously means reaching
out to people who don't already believe as we do. It means saying
unpopular things to people who are offended by them. He apparently
doesn't object to all the right-wingers like Walter Block who are pissed
off about our anti-capitalism and class struggle stuff. So basically he
must be saying the class war aspects of left-libertarianism and
anarchism are worth taking a stand on even at the expense of pissing
some people off, because getting the workerist and anti-corporate types
on our side is worth it, even if it means treating the concerns of PoC,
women and LGBT people as marginal trivia and throwing them under the
bus. But taking a stand on the concerns of the latter from a libertarian
standpoint is bad because those people aren't important -- but the
workerist dudebro types and their hurt feelings are.

Shorter version: Anti-empire and class stuff is important, "real"
anarchism; people who are fucked over by social forms of domination
aren't. The people who get offended by calling them out on racism,
homophobia, etc. are vital to our outreach mission. The PoC, women,
gays, trans ppl, etc., who have felt excluded from a white middle-class
and culturally right-wing movement for years, and dismissed
libertarianism as irrelevant, are entirely expendable.